Written by Ivan Bercovich
on 

How I'm spending my sabbatical

After finishing college at UMass Amherst, I went straight into my first job. I packed my blue 2001 Honda Civic, and drove across the country, hoping to find my place in the universe. While I was awed at the notion of working for a tech giant, Cisco, I was quickly disillusioned, feeling like an insignificant part of a giant machine. College is also large. UMass Amherst has over twenty thousand undergraduates, and the roughly five thousand graduating seniors fill an entire football field. But colleges are centered around students, and for me academics was a competitive sport. With a heavy course load, a couple degrees, top grades, and the occasional politized toga party (for which my housemates heroically took the fall to protect my green card proceedings), one could become decently successful. Thus, when buried in the bowels of Cisco, it became evident that I should go to grad school, so I could feel special again. As soon as I got accepted into UCSB for a PhD in Financial Mathematics, I quit my position at Cisco and explored myself and the Bay Area for six months. I can point to some interesting experiences during that time, such as having a couple founders casually walking me through their “AirBnB” website at the YCombinator lobby. But the biggest benefit of this hiatus was simply “being;” exploring without a compass or driven by any goals other than sheer curiosity and serendipity. I’ve always looked back at those days as a period of personal growth.

Fast forward a decade. With some hard work and a lot of luck, California delivered on the dream. After some awkward but intriguing interviews with Kevin O’Connor, I dropped out of my doctorate and joined FindTheBest (later known as Graphiq). Seven years, a number of SEO crises and subsequent pivots later, we managed to impress some people at Amazon Alexa and got acquired. I met a wonderful life partner, Patricia, and executed a gentleman’s agreement with Julia, her daughter, to accept my terms for adoption- mostly involving my right of taxation in the form of half of any desirable food item in her possession. But I digress. Graphiq has been the most rewarding chapter in my career, and in many ways inseparable from my own identity. While solving difficult technical problems and deluding ourselves into world domination while being choked by Google Panda was fun, and the not-always-gentle process of becoming a bonafide Amazonian is priceless; my greatest memories are about the roughly 500 different people we hired, almost always straight from college, and having the opportunity to see them grow into awesomeness (even, shockingly, Jeff Kandel). I hope to have had an impact on most of these people and I know many of them had an impact on me. Causality aside, I get a wonderful sense of joy whenever each of these individuals find their personal successes. This is to say, there aren’t many moments I would change about the last ten years, and yet I knew this wasn’t my final act, so when the time was right I passed the torch and left everything I’d known for a decade.

As a well-trained Amazonian, it was clear I had to prepare a thorough Operating Plan in order to properly allocate my resources (mostly time) during this sabbatical. The first step was to synthesize years of introspection to understand my wants and needs. Chief among my concerns was the lack of serendipity in my life. To some, that might be addressed by traveling the world and talking to strangers. For me, it was more about intellectual exploration. There is something about my lifestyle during teenage and college years, which lent itself to knowing a little about a lot of things. During the past decade, I’ve instead learned a lot about a few things (structured data / knowledge graphs, natural language processing, engineering management). The struggle between depth and breadth is not unique to me, or unique to humans by that matter. The book “Algorithms to live by” does a good job discussing exploration vs. exploitation. The gist is, we explore as children and become more exploitative as we age. This approach makes rational sense: build an inventory of skills during early career, then make money; save money the first three quarters of your life, and then retire; explore various tastes in music and movies, then become more selective. Yet, simply accepting the inevitable passage through life’s various phases seems uninspiring. In spite of its absolute futility, I want to postpone the calcification of my mind and habits for as long as possible. I cherish my inner child. Thus, I must intentionally revert the trend, nurturing my beginner’s mind and an appetite for the unknown. As a fitness function, I decided to bias my adventures towards value creation, rather than pure consumption (e.g. reading). Finally, I felt compelled to complement a youthful mind with a healthy body by increasing my attention to physical exercise.

In summary:

How am I doing after 45 days?

Embrace intellectual exploration: Progress on this goal is rather difficult to quantify, and being too focused on attainment might actually hinder the originating intention. Still, I can sense the personal growth. After 10 years, I was starting to develop an aversion to technology topics, but as soon as technology stopped being my job, that disdain disappeared. I’ve been catching up on cryptography (with an interest in privacy), computer architecture (a couple of books on Rust and a refresher course on computer architecture), and machine learning. To stay creative, I spent some time playing with modern tools, such as 3D printing and Unity. I’ve also been reading/listening to business biographies (Iger, Branson, Jobs, Gates, Campbell, Buffett), which I enjoy and later recall better than a typical business book. Next, I’d like to push further out from my comfort zone.

Participate in value creation: I always advise young people to do things for others, for free. The best way to learn is to be involved in cool projects and with interesting people, and a formal relationship can sometimes be an impedance. I decided to take my own advice and focus my attention on entrepreneurship. This has been both the most rewarding and growth-inducing goal. I’ve been able to get deep into the details of projects completely orthogonal to my area of expertise, such as smoking cessation, bee pollination, railway automation, and land valuation. The entrepreneurs on the other side seem to appreciate my beginner’s mindset while also drawing parallels to my experience. I’ve been able to understand the value of my experience outside of a hierarchical construct where my authority is preordained. I’ve found that most people want to be challenged and pushed and that I can be an effective advisor without being anyone’s boss. Finally, I can observe value being created. Technical roadblocks being overcome, organizational questions being answered, software development best practices being put in place, funding stories and connections being developed. I’m very satisfied with this trajectory and plan to allocate more time to this thread.

Get in shape: Besides being wholesome for the soul, this goal is easy to measure. I purchased a Garmin Forerunner 935 watch, and started to track various metrics. The trend these days is to focus on VO^2 Max, a measure of both endurance and cardiovascular health. On a typical week, I’m allocating about 6 hours of intense exercising, broken down into 2 bike rides and 2 runs. I enjoy going up and down the mountains, so I trade distance for altitude gain. I’m roughly covering 65 miles and 9000 ft of elevation gain on a typical week, with about 80% of that on the bike. My VO^2 Max is 52, 90th percentile for my age and gender. Through this process I’ve learned that this is about optimal for me, and my fantasies about ultra endurance have become less appealing. I’ve also come to appreciate this is a rhythm I can maintain indefinitely, and that it could have been compatible with my previous work schedule, though I didn’t think so at the time. Next, I’d like to set and achieve some concrete goals (maybe Everesting in 1 week).

Closing thoughts

While this state feels temporary, I could go on for a while. I’m certainly less productive in the traditional sense, and that is a source of discomfort. On the other hand, I am happier, healthier, and feel more creative and open to possibilities. I’m starting to see new threads emerge and am fantasizing about crazy ideas, and I’m confident this process is building the foundation for the next decade. Time will tell.